The first coherent thought that pierced through Amaris Doyle's disoriented awakening was the smell of ozone and something else. Something acrid and unsettlingly sterile, like a lightning strike inside a hospital.
It was a stark contrast to the familiar, comforting scents of brine, tarred rope, and old wood that usually defined her world aboard the Aeternus.
She pushed herself up from her bunk, her body feeling strangely light. Yet also compressed by the same oppressive gravity Valeria had noted.
Her joints, usually stiff from years of kneeling in prayer and the lingering aches of old field injuries from her time with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), moved with an unnerving, youthful fluidity.
She caught her reflection in the small, polished metal square that served as her mirror. The woman staring back was a ghost from her early twenties, the lines of worry and sunburn smoothed away. Her usually tightly bound auburn hair was now a shade brighter, almost fiery.
The silver crucifix she always wore, a gift from her convent, felt cold against her new skin. It was a disturbing transformation, a shedding of years she hadn't asked for. A return to a version of herself she thought long past.
***
Specialization: Bio-Restoration, Faith Channeling (Latent).>
***
The words had scrolled across her vision moments after the Captain's initial, strained announcement. Surgeon-Chaplain.
It was a strange amalgamation of her two callings, yet the "Bio-Restoration" and "Faith Channeling" parts felt alien, tinged with an unnerving power she didn't understand but could already feel thrumming beneath her skin, a faint golden warmth in her hands.
Her immediate concern, however, was more practical. The storm if that's what the cataclysmic event could be called had been violent. There would be injuries.
She moved towards the small cabinet where she kept her medical supplies: bandages, antiseptics, sutures, and the few precious antibiotics she managed to keep viable at sea. It was gone.
The familiar wooden cabinet had been replaced by a smooth, metallic panel, seamlessly integrated into the bulkhead. There was no handle, no latch.
"What in God's name…?" she murmured, running her hand over the cool, unresponsive surface. Panic began to bubble. How could she treat anyone without her tools, without her medicines?
She hurried out on deck, drawn by the rising murmur of confused and frightened voices.
The scene was as Valeria had described: a crew of de-aged sailors, their faces a mixture of shock and dawning horror, all grappling with the impossible reality of their new System-assigned roles.
Captain Mallory, a pillar of youthful authority, was attempting to restore order.
Her attention was snagged by a plume of smoke, or rather steam, hissing from a section of the port gunwale. A piece of canvas, likely a torn section of sail, lay draped over the rail, smoldering.
It wasn't burning with an open flame, but rather… dissolving, the edges charring and flaking away as if touched by a potent acid.
The core image from the System prompt: Burned canvas steaming on gunwale. It was a stark illustration of how alien and hostile this new environment was, or perhaps how the ship itself had changed.
Several crewmen were already there, staring at it with a mixture of fear and morbid curiosity. One of them, a young lad named Finn, who'd been nursing a nasty rope burn on his arm before the… event, now looked barely old enough to shave.
His arm, however, was what caught Amaris's medical eye. The burn was still there, an angry red welt, but it seemed… less inflamed, almost superficial compared to how it had looked.
"Finn, your arm," she said, her voice cutting through his bewildered stare. She gently took his arm, her touch surprisingly steady despite the tremor in her soul.
The skin around the burn was warm, but not with the heat of infection.
As her fingers brushed against the injury, a faint golden light she'd noticed earlier in her cabin flickered around her hands, almost gradually. Finn gasped, not in pain, but in surprise.
"Sister… it… it doesn't hurt as much," he stammered, his eyes wide. The redness seemed to recede slightly, the angry puffiness diminishing before her very eyes.
It wasn't a complete healing, not by any stretch, but it was an accelerated recovery unlike anything she'd ever witnessed, even with modern medicine.
***
***
The System's message scrolled in her vision. XP? Experience points? Like in one of Riku's video games? The thought was both ludicrous and terrifying. Her healing, her calling, reduced to a game mechanic.
"The Lord works in mysterious ways, Finn," she said, her voice a little shaky. But was it the Lord?
Her gaze was drawn to the ship itself. The Aeternus was a marvel of transformation, a terrifying beauty.
The familiar lines of the war-barque were still there, but overlaid with an impossible sleekness, a latent power that hummed in the very air.
She saw what Mallory had described: the oak veneer that seemed to sheath a core of dark, unyielding metal.
The cannons were no longer the simple muzzle-loaders she was used to. Along the rails, where smaller swivel guns might have been, were eight massive, complex contraptions of dark wood and gleaming, bone-like material, strung with what looked like enormous sinews.
These had to be the "Storm-Bolt gravity ballista," the ship's manifest, now somehow accessible through her System interface, described weapons that used "leviathan-bone torsion." Leviathan bone. The thought sent a shiver down her spine.
And then there were the coil-cannons. Two of them, one port and one starboard, nestled mid-ship, their long barrels hinting at incredible range and power.
The manifest claimed they fired "3-kg flechette sabots at Mach 4." Mach 4. It was a speed, a destructive capability, that belonged to warships of a future she couldn't comprehend, not to a vessel that still carried canvas sails.
Even the sails themselves were different. Marisol de la Cruz, her face a mask of bewildered fascination, was running a hand over a newly unfurled jib. The material was a creamy white, shot through with what looked like opal-blue threads.
"Kelp-fiber canvas," the manifest called it. It felt incredibly light, yet possessed an unnatural tensile strength.
Mari, the ship's new Sailmaker & Morph-Skin Custodian, was already murmuring about its strange resonance, how it seemed to hum faintly when she sang a high note.
Amaris's exploration eventually led her below decks, searching for the infirmary. The old sickbay, a cramped but functional space, was gone.
In its place was a larger compartment, bathed in a soft, ambient light that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. Smooth, metallic consoles lined one bulkhead, their surfaces dark and inert.
There were several berths, more like medical alcoves, each equipped with what looked like sophisticated diagnostic sensors embedded in the frames.
It was sterile, efficient, and utterly alien. There were no comforting bottles of tinctures, no neatly rolled bandages, no familiar scent of carbolic soap. Just cold, advanced technology she had no idea how to operate.
"Lost, Sister?"
She turned to see Helga Rössler, the newly designated Engineer Clean-Core Chief, standing in the doorway. Helga, usually quiet and reserved, had a strange new intensity in her eyes, a focused energy that Amaris hadn't seen before. She held a small, metallic device in her hand, its surface covered in glowing glyphs.
"Just… trying to find my bearings, Helga. And my supplies," Amaris said, gesturing to the empty consoles. "This is supposed to be the infirmary, but it looks more like… well, I don't know what it looks like."
Helga stepped inside, her gaze sweeping the room. "The System indicates this is the primary medical bay. Supplies are… synthesized. On demand. Or so the schematics suggest."
She tapped the device in her hand. "I'm still trying to interface with the ship's core systems. The Clean-Core… It's beyond anything I ever studied. A contained nuclear fission-fusion hybrid, if the energy signatures are to be believed. It's… beautiful. And terrifying."
Amaris felt a pang of her old life, a memory surfacing unbidden. She was back in a field hospital in a war-torn African village.
Supplies were critically low.
She'd spent hours, days, praying for a miracle, for a supply drop that never came, watching helplessly as lives slipped away for want of basic antibiotics, clean bandages.
She remembered the crushing weight of her helplessness, the desperate bargains she'd tried to make with God in the dead of night, surrounded by the sounds of suffering.
It was the rainy season, and the mud was a constant, sucking presence. Cholera had broken out in the refugee camp, and Amaris, then barely twenty-three, was running on fumes and faith.
She'd been a Benedictine novice before joining Médecins Sans Frontières, her desire to serve humanity pulling her from the cloistered walls to the front lines of suffering. She remembered a young mother, delirious with fever, clutching a dying infant.
Amaris had done everything she could, rehydrating the child with the last of their saline solution, cleaning the mother's sores, whispering prayers for comfort, for a strength that felt increasingly distant.
The child had died in her arms, a tiny, feather-light weight. The mother's hollow wail had echoed in Amaris's soul for years. That night, kneeling in the mud beside her cot, Amaris had questioned everything her skills, her purpose, her God.
Why grant her the desire to heal, the compassion to care, but not the means to truly save them? It was a wound that had never fully healed, a quiet ache that had driven her deeper into both her medical practice and her faith, seeking a balance, an answer.
Now, in this alien infirmary, with the promise of synthesized supplies and abilities that bordered on the miraculous, that old ache resonated with a new, complex chord.
Was this the answer to those desperate prayers? A power to heal, to restore, granted by an unknown, unknowable System? It felt like a monkey's paw, a gift with an unseen, terrible price.
"Synthesized," Amaris repeated, her voice distant. "Like… magic?"
Helga gave a rare, small smile. "Like sufficiently advanced technology, Sister. Or perhaps, in this place, the line is blurred." She gestured to one of the dark consoles. "According to the initial diagnostics, you should be able to interface with it. Your System role… it grants you access."
Taking a deep breath, Amaris approached the console. As she reached out, the surface flickered to life, bathing her face in a soft blue light.
Glyphs and diagrams swirled across the screen, information flowing in a way that was both overwhelming and strangely intuitive.
A list of potential medical supplies appeared, from basic analgesics to complex cellular regeneration agents. All it seemed to require was a thought, a command.
***
***
She thought of Finn's burn, of the smoldering canvas. This world bled saltwater and fire, and her crew would need more than just prayers.
They would need a surgeon. And perhaps, a chaplain who could make sense of a System that turned faith into a quantifiable resource.
"Thank you, Helga," Amaris said, a new resolve hardening her gaze. She might not understand this new world, or the powers granted to her, but she understood her duty. Her crew was her flock, her patients. And she would not fail them. Not again.